SAVE TO MY LIBRARY

Mass Transit, New Towns, and National Parks in New York City's 'Forgotten Borough'

My dissertation insists that Staten Island is central not only to the history of twentieth-century New York City, but to postwar urban planning and politics more broadly. Despite its absence from almost every major historical work on the postwar urban crisis, the borough was considered by many planners and politicians to be New York City's greatest asset and most volatile liability. Set against the rest of the boroughs' declining populations and shrinking tax revenues, Staten Island's large swaths of vacant acres provided a blank slate onto which urbanists mapped their conflicting critiques and cure-alls for the American city. Amongst a long list of influential politicians, environmentalists, and planning organizations that debated the future of Staten Island, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the Regional Plan Association (RPA) stand out as having particular interest in and influence on the borough. My research at the Rockefeller Archive Center was integral to tracking and contextualizing both Rockefeller's and the RPA's planning approaches to the "forgotten borough" -- philosophies which by the early 1970s had come into tension with one another. While Rockefeller would move, in the late 1960s, toward encouraging a dense, socially-diverse, mass-transit oriented Staten Island, the RPA's uncompromising support of Gateway National Recreation Area would forestall precisely the type of new town planning project -- the South Richmond Development Corporation designed by James Rouse -- that was capable of densifying and integrating the borough's overwhelmingly white, middle-class southern shore.

Document Type

Language

Geography

This web page is marked up with Schema.org microdata. Much of the necessary microdata is embedded within the HTML that creates the display you see above. The data that shows below is formatted for machine-reading and rounds out the complete descriptive set for this resource. Want more info about all of this? Go here. You can also view the complete dataset for this resource the way a machine sees it here .